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by Friedrich Nietzsche

1

The will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous
truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respect -
what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! What strange,
wicked, questionable questions! That is a long story even now - and yet it
seems as if it had scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that we should finally
become suspicious, lose patience, and turn away impatiently? that we should
finally learn from this Sphinx to ask questions, too? Who is it really that
puts questions to us here? What in us really wants "truth"?

Indeed we came to a long halt at the question about the cause of this will
- until we finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question.
We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather
untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?

The problem of the value of truth came before us - or was it we who came
before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a
rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.

And though it scarcely seems credible, it finally almost seems to us as if
the problem had never even been put so far - as if we were the first to see
it, fix it with our eyes, and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps
there is none that is greater.

2

"How could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of
error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? or selfless deeds
out of selfishness? or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust?
Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, indeed worse;
the things of highest value must have another, peculiar origin - they cannot
be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry world from
this turmoil of delusion and lust. Rather from the lap of Being, the
intransitory, the hidden god, the 'thing-in-itself' - there must be their
basis, and nowhere else."

This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice
which give away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms
in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this
"faith" that they trouble themselves about "knowledge," about something that
is finally baptized solemnly as "the truth." The fundamental faith of the
metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. It has not even occurred to
the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the
threshold where it was surely most necessary - even if they vowed to
themselves, "de ornnibus dubitandum."

For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and
secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the
metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates,
only provisional perspectives perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below,
frog perspective as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. For all the
value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be
possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be
ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that
what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that
they are insidiously related, tied to and involved with these wicked,
seemingly opposite things - maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!

But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous maybes? For
that, one really has to wait for the advent of a new species of philosophers
such as have somehow another and converse taste and propensity from those we
have known so far - philosophers of the dangerous "maybe" in every sense.

And in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers coming up.

3

After having looked long enough between the philosopher's lines and fingers,
I say to myself: by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be
included among instinctive activities, and that goes even for philosophical
thinking. We have to relearn here, as one has had to relearn about heredity
and what is "innate." As the act of birth deserves no consideration in the
whole process and procedure of heredity, so "being conscious" is not in any
decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious
thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain
channels by his instincts.

Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand
valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a
certain type of life. For example, that the definite should be worth more than
the indefinite, and mere appearance worth less than "truth" - such estimates
might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless mere
foreground estimates, a certain kind of niaiserie which may be
necessary for the preservation of just such beings as we are. Supposing, that
is, that not just man is the "measure of things."

4

The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a
judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question
is to what extent it is life-promoting, life serving, species-preserving,
perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim
that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments a
priori) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the
fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented
world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant
falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that
renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life.
To recognize untruth as a condition of life - that certainly means resisting
accustomed value feelings in a dangerous, way; and a philosophy that risks
this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.

5

What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half
mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they are -
how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray; in short, their
childishness and childlikeness - but that they are not honest enough in
their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of
truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had
discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development
cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of
every rank, who are more honest and doltish - and talk of "inspiration");
while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration"
- most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract
- that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are
all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily
spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize "truths" - and very far
from having the courage of the conscience that admits this, precisely this,
to itself; very far from having the good taste of the courage which also
lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuberance,
to mock itself.

The equally stiff and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us
on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his "categorical imperative" - really
lead astray and seduce - this spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious
and find it quite amusing to watch closely the subtle tricks of old moralists
and preachers of morals. Or consider the hocus-pocus of mathematical form with
which Spinoza a clad his philosophy - really "the love of his wisdom," to
render that word fairly and squarely - in mail and mask, to strike terror at
the very outset into the heart of any assailant who should dare to glance at
that invincible maiden and Pallas Athena: how much personal timidity and
vulnerability this masquerade of a sick hermit betrays!

6

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has
been - namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of
involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral)
intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which
the whole plant had grown.

Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a
philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at
what morality does all this (does he) aim? According, I do not believe that a
"drive to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but rather that another
drive has, here as elsewhere employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as
a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to
what extent they may have been at play just here as in inspiring spirits (or
demons and kobolds) will find that all of them have done philosophy at some
time - and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent
just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of
all the other drives. For every drive wants to be master - and it attempts to
philosophize in that spirit.

To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men things may be
different -"better," if you like - there you may really find something like a
drive for knowledge, some small independent clockwork that, once well wound,
works on vigorously without any essential participation from all the other
drives of the scholar. The real "interests" of the scholar therefore lie
usually somewhere else - say, in his family, or in making money, or in
politics. Indeed, it is almost a matter of total indifference whether his
little machine is placed at this or that spot in science, and whether the
"promising" young worker turns himself into a good philologist or an expert on
fungi or a chemist: it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that.
In the philosopher conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal;
and above all his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is -
that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in
relation to each other.

7

How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more venomous than the
joke Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists; he called
them Dionysiokolakes. That means literally - and this is the
foreground meaning -"flatterers of Dionysius," in other words, tyrant's
baggage and lickspittles; but addition to this he also wants to say, "they
are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them" (for Dionysokolax
was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is really the malice that
Epicurus aimed at Plato: he was peeved by the grandiose manner, the mise
en scene at which Plato and his disciples were so expert - at which
Epicurus was not an expert - he, that old schoolmaster from Samos who sat,
hidden away, in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books -
who knows? perhaps from rage and ambition against Plato?

It took a hundred years until Greece found out who this garden god,
Epicurus, had been - did they find out?

8

There is a point in every philosophy when the philosopher's "conviction"
appears on the stage - or to use the language of an ancient Mystery:

Adventavit asinus,
Pulcher et fortissimus.

9

"According to nature" you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive
words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure,
indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without
mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time;
imagine indifference itself as a power - how could you live according to
this indifference? Is that not precisely wanting to be other than this
nature? Is not living - estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited
- wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative "live according to
nature" meant at bottom as much as "live according to life" how could you
not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?

In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend
rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something
opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose
your morality, your ideal, on nature - even on nature - and incorporate them
in her; you demand that she be nature "according to the Stoa," and you would
like all existence to exist only after your own image - as an immense eternal
glorification and generalization of Stoicism. For all your love of truth, you
have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to
see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically, that you are no longer able to see
her differently. And some abysmal arrogance finally still inspires you with
the insane hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves - Stoicism
is self tyranny - nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoic -
a piece of nature?

But this is an ancient, eternal story: what formerly happened with the
Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe
in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do
otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will
to power, to the "creation of the world," to the causa prima.

10

The eagerness and subtlety-I might even say, shrewdness- with which the
problem of "the real and the apparent world" is to day attacked all over
Europe makes one think and wonder; and anyone who hears nothing in the
background except a "will to truth," certainly does not have the best of
ears. In rare and isolate instances it may really be the case that such a
will to truth, some extravagant and adventurous courage, a metaphysician's
ambition to hold a hopeless position, may participate and ultimately prefer
even a handful of "certainty" to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities;
there may actually be puritanical fanatics of conscience who prefer even a
certain nothing to an uncertain something to lie down on - and die. But this
is nihilism and the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul - however
courageous the gestures of such a virtue may look.

It seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who
are still eager for life. When they side against appearance, and speak of
"perspective," with a new arrogance; when they rank the credibility of their
own bodies about as low as the credibility of the visual evidence that "the
earth stands still," and thus, apparently in good humor, let their securest
possession go (for in what does one at present believe more firmly than in
one's body?) -who knows if they are not trying at bottom to win back something
that was formerly an even securer possession, something of the ancient domain
of the faith of former times, perhaps the "immortal soul," perhaps "the old
God," in short, ideas by which one could live better, that is to say, more
vigorously and cheerfully than by "modern ideas"? There is mistrust of these
modern ideas in this attitude, a disbelief in all that has been constructed
yesterday and today; there is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and
scorn, unable to endure any longer the bric-a-brac of concepts of the most
diverse origin, which is the form in which so-called positivism offers itself
on the market today; a disgust of the more fastidious taste at the
village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters in
whom there is nothing new or genuine, except this motleyness. In this, it
seems to me, we should agree with these skeptical anti-realists and knowledge
microscopists of today: their instinct, which repels them from modern reality,
is unrefuted - what do their retrograde bypaths concern us! The main thing
about them is not that they wish to go back, but that they wish to get - away.
A little more strength, flight, courage, and artistic power. and they would
want to rise - not return!

11

lt seems to me that today attempts are made everywhere to diver attention
from the actual influence Kant exerted on German philosophy, and especially
to ignore prudently the value he set upon himself. Kant was first and
foremost proud of his table of categories; with that in his hand he said:
"This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of
metaphysics."

Let us only understand this "could be"! He was proud of having discovered
a new faculty in man, the faculty for synthetic judgments a priori.
Suppose he deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid
flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his pride, and on
the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover, if possible,
something still prouder - at all events "new faculties"!

But let us reflect; it is high time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments
a priori possible?" Kant asked himself - and what really is his
answer? "By virtue of a faculty" but unfortunately not in five words, but so
circumstantially, venerably, and with such a display of German profundity and
curlicues that people simply failed to note the comical niaiserie allemande
involved in such an answer. People were actually beside themselves with
delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant
further discovered a moral faculty in man - for at that time the Germans were
still moral and not yet addicted to Realpolitik.

The honeymoon of German philosophy arrived. All the young theologians of
the Tubingen seminary went into the bushes - all looking for "faculties." And
what did they not find - in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of
the German spirit, to which romanticism, the malignant fairy, piped and sang,
when one could not yet distinguish between "finding" and "inventing"! Above
all, a faculty for the "surprasensible": Schelling christened it intellectual
intuition, and thus gratified the most heartfelt cravings of the Germans,
whose cravings were at bottom pious. One can do no greater wrong to the whole
of this exuberant and enthushiastic movement, which was really youthfulness,
however boldly it disguised itself in hoary and senile concepts, than to take
it seriously or worse, to treat it with moral indignation. Enough, one grew
older and the dream vanished. A time came when people scratched their heads,
and they still scratch them today. One had been dreaming, and first and
foremost - old Kant. "By virtue of a faculty" - he had said, or at least
meant. But is that an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a
repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "By virtue of a
faculty," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere,

Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.

But such replies belong in comedy, and it is high time to replace the
Kantian question, "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" by
another question, "Why is belief in such judgments necassary?" - and to
comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of
the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course,
be false judgments for all that! Or to speak more clearly and coarsely:
synthetic judgments a priori should not "be possible" at all; we have
no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only,
of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief
and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life.

Finally, to call to mind the enormous influence that "German philosophy" -
I hope you understand its right to quotation marks - has exercised throughout
the whole of Europe, there is no doubt that a certain virtus dormitiva
had a share in it: it was a delight to the noble idlers, the virtuous, the
mystics, artists, three-quarter Christians, and political obscurantists of all
nations, to find, thanks to German philosophy, an antidote to the still
predominant sensualism which overflowed from the last century into this, in
short - "sensus assoupire."

12

As for materialistic atomism, it is one of the best refuted theories there
are, and in Europe perhaps no one in the learned world is now so unscholarly
as to attach serious significance to it for convenient household use (as an
abbreviation of the means of expression) thanks chiefly to the Dalmatian
Boscovich and the Pole Corpernicus have been the greatest and most
successful opponents of visual evidence so far. For while Copernicus has
persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not
stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last part of
the earth that "stood fast" - the belief in substance," in "matter," in the
earth-residuum and particle-atom; it is the greatest triumph over the senses
that has been gained on earth so far.

One must, however, go still further. and also declare war, relentless war
unto death, against the "atomistic need" which still leads a dangerous
afterlife in places where no one suspects it, just like the more celebrated
"metaphysical need": one must also, first of all, give the finishing stroke to
that other and more calamitous atomism which Christianity has taught best and
longest, the soul atomism. Let it be permitted to designate by this
expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible.
eternal, in divisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to
be expelled from science! Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get
rid of "the soul" at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most
ancient and venerable hypotheses - as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists
who can hardly touch on "the soul" without immediately losing it. But the way
is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such
conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul as subjective multiplicity," and
''soul as social structure of the drives and affects want henceforth to have
citizens' rights in science. When the new psychologist puts an end to the
superstitions which have so far flourished with almost tropical luxuriance
around the idea of the soul, he practically exiles himself into a new desert
and a new suspicion - it is possible that the older psychologists had a
merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that
precisely thereby he also concerns himself to invention - and - who
knows? - perhaps to discovery.

13

Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of
self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living
thing seeks above all to discharge its strength - life itself is will to
power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent
results.

In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous
teleological principles - one of which is the instinct of self preservation
(we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency). Thus method, which must be essentially
economy of principles, demands it.

14

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only
an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!)
and not a world-explanation; but insofar as it is based on belief in the
senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded
as more - namely, as an explanation. Eyes and fingers speak in its favor,
visual evidence and palpableness do, too: this strikes an age with
fundamentally plebian tastes as fascinating, persuasive, and convincing -
after all, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular
sensualism. What is clear, what is "explained"? Only what can be seen and
felt - every problem has to be pursued to that point. Conversely, the charm
of the Platonic way of thinking, which was a noble way of thinking,
consisted precisely in resistance to obvious sense-evidence - perhaps among
men who enjoyed even stronger and more demanding senses than our
contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining
masters of their senses - and this by means of pale, cold, gray concept nets
which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses - the mob of the
senses, as Plato said. In this overcoming of the world and interpreting of
the world in the manner of Plato, there was an enjoyment different from that
which the physicists of today offer us - and also the Darwinists and
anti-teleologists among the workers in physiology, with their principle of
the "smallest possible force" and the greatest possible stupidity. "Where
man cannot find anything to see or to grasp, he has no further business" -
that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may
be the right imperative for a tough, industrious race of machinists and
bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do.

15

To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist that the sense
organs are not phenomena in the sense of idealistic philosophy; as such they
could not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as a regulative
hypothesis, if not as a heuristic principle.

What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our
organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work
of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs!
It seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum - assuming
that the concept of a causa sui is something fundamentally absurd.
Consequently, the external world is just the work of our organs - ?

16

There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are
"immediate certainties"; for example, "I think," or as the superstition of
Schopenhauer put it, "I will"; as though knowledge here got hold of its
object purely and nakedly as "the thing in it self" without any
falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that
"immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in
itself," involve a contradictio adjecto. I shall repeat a hundred
times; we really ought to free our selves from the seduction of words!

Let the people suppose that knowledge means knowing things entirely; the
philosopher must say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed
in the sentence, "I think," I find a whole series of daring assertions that
would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I
who think, that there must neccssarily be something that thinks, that thinking
is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a
cause, that there is an "ego," and, finally, that it is already determined
what is to be designated by thinking - that I know what thinking is. For if I
had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I
determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps "willing" or
"feeling"? In short, the assertion "I think" assumes that I compare my state
at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to
determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further
"knowledge," it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.

In place of the "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in
the case at hand, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical
questions presented to him, truly searching questions of the intellect; to
wit: "From where do I get the concept of thing? Why do I believe in cause and
effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even of an ego as
cause, and finally ego as the cause of thought?" Whoever ventures to answer
the metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive
perception, like the person who says, "I think, and know that at least, is
true, actual, and certain" - will encounter a smile and two question marks
from a philosopher nowadays. "Sir," the philosopher will perhaps give him to
understand, "it is improbable that you are not mistaken; but why insist on the
truth?"

17

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of
emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to
concede - namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes. and not when "I"
wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the
subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." It thinks; but that
this "it" is precisely the famous old "ego" is, to put it mildly, only a
supposition, an assertion. and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After
all, one has even gone too far with this "it thinks" - even the "it"
contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the
process itself. 0ne infers here according to the grammatical habit:
"Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently..."

It was pretty much according to the same schema that the older atomism
sought, besides the operating "power," that lump of matter in which it resides
and out of which it operates - the atom. More rigorous minds, however, learned
at last to get along without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we
shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians, to get along without the
little "it" (which is all that is left of the honest little old ego).

18

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is
precisely thereby that it attracts subtler minds. It seems that the
hundred-times-refuted theory of a "free will" owes its persistence to this
charm alone; again and again someone comes along who feels he is strong
enough to refute it.

19

Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as if it were the
best-known thing in the world; indeed, Schopenhauer has given us to
understand that the will alone is really known to us, absolutely and
completely known, without subtraction or addition. But again and again it
seems to me that in this case, too, Schopenhauer only did what philosophers
are in the habit of doing - he adopted a popular prejudice and exaggerated
it. Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something
that is a unit only as a word - and it is precisely in this one word that
the popular prejudice lurks, which has defeated the always inadequate
caution of philosophers. So let us for once be more cautious, let us be
"unphilosophical": let us say that in all willing there is, first, a
plurality of sensations, namely, the sensation of the state "away from
which" the sensation of the state "towards which," the sensation of this
"from and towards" themselves, and then also an accompanying muscular
sensation, which, even without our putting into motion "arms and legs,"
begins its action by force of habit as soon as we "will" anything.

Therefore just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of sensation) are to
be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, secondly, should thinking also:
in every act of the will there is a ruling thought - let us not imagine it
possible to sever this thought from the "willing," as if any will would then
remain over!

Third, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is
above all an affect, and specifically the affect of the command. That which is
termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the affect of superiority in
relation to him who must obey: "I am free, 'he' must obey" - this
consciousness is inherent in every will; and equally so the straining of the
attention, the straight look that fixes itself exclusively on one aim, the
unconditional evaluation that "thls and nothing else is necessary now," the
inward certainty that obedience will be rendered - and whatever else belongs
to the position of the commander. A man who wills commands something within
himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience.

But now let us notice what is strangest about the will - this manifold
thing for which the people have only one word: inasmuch as in the given
circumstances we are at the same time the commanding and the obeying parties,
and as the obeying party we know the sensations of constraint, impulsion,
pressure, resistance and motion, which usually begin immediately after the act
of will, inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to disregard this
duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by means of thc synthetic concept
"I," a whole series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently of false
evaluations of the will itself, has become attached to the act of willing - to
such a degree that he who wills believes sincerely that willing suffices for
action. Since in thc great majority of cases there has been exereise of will
only when the effect of the command - that is, obedience; that is, the action
- was to be expected, the appearance has translated itself into the feeling,
as if there were a necessity of effect. In short, he who wills believes with a
fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the
success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby
enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success.

"Freedom of the will" - that is the expression for the complex state of
delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time
identifies himself with the executor of the order - who, as such, enjoys also
the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his
will itself that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition
adds the feeling of delight of his successful executive instruments, the
useful "under-wills" or under-souls - indeed, our body is but a social
structure composed of many souls - to his feelings of delight as commander
L'effet c'est moi: what happens here is what happens in every
well-constructed and happy commonwealth; namely, the governing class
identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing it is
absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already
said, of a social structure composed of many "souls." Hence a philosopher
should claim the right to include willomg as such within the sphere of morals
- morals being understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under
which the phemenon of "life" comes to be.

20

That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or
autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and reltionship with each
other; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the
history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all
the members of the fauna of a continent - is betrayed in the end also by the
fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite
fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they
always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each
other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills,
something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order,
one after the other - to wit, the innate systematic structure and
relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a
discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a
remote, primordial, an inclusive houschold of the soul, out of which those
concepts grew originall: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism
of the highest order.

The strange family resemblance of all lndian, Greck, and German
philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of
languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar - I mean,
owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical
functions - that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar
development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems
barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation. It is
highly probable that philosophers wlthin the domain of the Ural-Altaic
languages (where the concept of the subject is least developed) look otherwise
"into the world," and will be found on paths of thought different from those
of the Indo-Germanic peoples and the Muslims: the spell of certain grammatical
functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial
conditions.

So much by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality regardinh the origin of
ideas.

21

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived
so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic; but the extravagant
pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with
just this nonsense. The desire for "free dom of the will" in the superlative
metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of
the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility
for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance,
and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui
and, with more than Munchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into
existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. Suppose someone
were thus to see through the boorish simplicity of this celebrated concept
of "free will" and put it out of his head altogether, l beg of him to carry
his "enlightenment" a step further, and so put out of his head the contrary
of this monstrous conception of "free will": I mean "unfree will," which
amounts to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly reify
"cause" and "effect" as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them,
now "naturalizes" in his thinking), according to the prevailing mechanical
doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it "effects" its end;
one should use "cause" and "effect" only as pure concepts, that is to say,
as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication -
not for explanation. In the "in itself" there is nothing of "causal
connections," of "necessity," or of "psychological non-freedom"; there the
effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule of "law." It is we alone
who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint,
number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this
symbol world into things as if it existed "in itself," we act once more as
we have always acted - mythologically. The "unfree will" is
mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.

lt is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker
senses in every "causal connection" and "psychological necessity" something of
constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure, and unfreedom; it is
suspicious to have such feelings - that person betrays himself. And in
general, if I have observed correctly, the "unfreedom of the will" is regarded
as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a
profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their "responsibility,"
their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits at any price
(the vain races belong to this class). Others, on the contrary, do not wish to
be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward
self-contempt, seek to lay the blame for them selves somewhere else. The
latter, when they write books, are in the habit today of taking the side of
criminals; a sort of socialist pity is thelr most attractive disguise. And as
a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself
surprisingly when it can pose as "la religion de la souffrance humaine";
that is its "good taste."

22

Forgive me as an old philologist who cannot desist from the malice of
putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation: but "nature's conformity
to law," of which you physicists talk so proudly as though - why, it exists
only owing to your interpretion and bad "philology." It is no matter of
fact, no "text," but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and
perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the
democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere equality bcfore the
law; nature is no different in that respect, no better off than we are" - a
fine instance of ulterior motivation, in which the plebian antagonism to
everything privileged and autocratic as well as a second and more refined
atheism are disguised once more. "Ni Dieu, ni maltre" - that is what
you, too, want; and therefore "cheers for the law of nature!" - is it not
so? But as said above, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might
come along who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could
read out of the same "nature" and with regard to the same phenomena rather
the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power
- an interpreter who would picture the unexceptional and unconditional
aspects of all "will to power" so vividly that almost every word, even the
word "tyranny" itself, would eventually sound unsuitable, or a weakening and
attenuating metaphor -being too human - but he might, nevertheless, end by
asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a
"necessary'' and "calculable" course, not because laws obtain in it, but
because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate
consequences at every moment. Supposing that this also is only interpreation
- and you will be eager enough to make this objection - well sp much the
better.

23

All psychology so far has got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has
not dared to descend into the depths. To understand it as morphology and the
doctrine of the development of the will to power, as I do - nobody has yet
come close to doing this even in thought - insofar as it is permissible to
recognize in what has been written so far a symptom of what has so far been
kept silent. The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the
most spiritual world, which would seem to be the coldest and most devoid of
presuppositions, and has obviously operated in an injurious, inhibiting,
blinding, and distorting manner. A proper physio-psychology has to contend
with unconscious resistance in the heart of the investigator, it has "the
heart" against it: even a doctrine of thc reciprocal dependence of the
"good' and the "wicked' drives, causes (as refined immorality) distress and
aversion in a still hale and hearty conscience - still more so, a doctrine
of the derivation of good impulses from wicked ones. If, however, a person
should regard even the affects of hatred, envy, covetousness, and the lust
to rule as conditions of life, as factors which, fundamcntally and
essentially must be present in the general cconomy of life (and must, there,
be further enhanced if life is to be further enhanced) - he will suffer from
such a view of things as from seasickness. And yet even this hypothesis is
far from being the strangest and most painful in this immense and almost new
domain of dangerous insights; and there are in fact a hundred good reasons
why everyone should keep away from it who - can.

On the other hand, if one has once drifted there with one's bark, well!
all right! let us clench our teeth! let us open our eyes and keep our hand
firm on the helm! We sail right over morality, we crush, we destroy perhaps
the remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage there - but what
matter are we! Never yet did a profounder world of insight reveal itself to
daring travelers and adventurers, and the psychologist who thus "makes a
sacrifice" - it is not the sacrifizio dell' intelletto, on the
contrary! - will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology
shall be recognized again as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and
preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology is now again the path to
the fundamental problems.